He had brought her eyes to his now, and, for the first time since they met, it was he who had the advantage. Frowning, yet clear, he bent his great young eyes upon her and she knew, dismayingly, that her thoughts were scattered.
“I have always cared for Rhoda.” She seized the first one. “Is it a future for Rhoda to disintegrate the life of the man who loves her and to get no good of him? Isn’t it better for a woman like Rhoda to go back to the apparent dignity, since she has no feeling for the real? Isn’t that what you would have felt, if you’d been feeling for Rhoda? It wasn’t because you felt for her,” said Christopher Darley. “You had some other reason. You are keeping another reason from me. You know,” he urged upon her with a strange, still austerity, “you know you can’t do that. You know we must say the truth to each other. You know that we simply belong to each other, you and I.”
“My dear Mr. Darley—my dear young man!”
She was, indeed, bereft of all resource. She laid down her poker and, as she did so, felt herself disarming before him. His eyes, following her retreat, challenged her, almost with fierceness.
“I know—I know that you are giving up something because of me,” he said. “You want her to go back to her husband now, so that I may be free. It wasn’t of me you thought this morning; nor of your brother, nor of Rhoda. Everything changed for you after you saw me. What is it? What is it that made you send Rhoda back to me and that makes you now want to free me? You are beautiful—but you are terrible. You do beautiful and terrible things. And you must let me share. You must let me decide, too, if you do them for me!”
He had started up, but not to come nearer in his appeal and his demand. Cut to the heart as he was,—for she knew how she had pierced,—it was rather the probing of some more intolerable pain that moved him. And looking down at her with eyes intolerant of her mercy, he embodied to her her sense of a new life and a new conscience. Absurd though his words might seem, they were true. Though never, perhaps, again to meet, she and Christopher Darley recognized in each other some final affinity and owed each other final truth.
She no longer felt old and wise, but young and helpless before the compulsion of the kindred soul. She owed him the truth, and in giving it she must risk his freedom and his happiness. Looking up at him, that sense of compulsion upon her, she said, “It was because of Jane Amoret. It was because I loved her and wanted to keep her.”
Christopher Darley grew paler than before. “She is here?”
“Yes. She came this morning. She is upstairs, sleeping.”
“Rhoda saw her?”